Credits: Photoplay magazine (United Artists publicity photo, 1939) — uncredited photographer / Wikimedia Commons — Public Domain (PD-US, copyright not renewed — published in the United States in 1939).
Released in France on February 11, 2026, Wuthering Heights brings together Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi and Emerald Fennell around a monument, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, published in 1847. Presented as a dark romance on film in grand spectacle, this 2 h 16 version anchors itself in the fever of the opening. However, it eliminates the rest. As a result, a storm of reproach arises. People judge less a film than a symptom. That symptom reflects a cinema that favors packaging over vertigo and converts the classic into an object of global desire.
The Cardboard Moor And The Plastic Heart
Imagine the Yorkshire moor, that skin of heather, wind and silence. Indeed, here it has become a studio set. At first you think you see the mist, then you realize it’s a veil, placed to give the illusion of depth. You think you hear the wind, then it resembles an overly polite sound effect. You find yourself searching behind the set for the slightest grain or roughness. Indeed, you look for something that scratches the image and reminds you that this story was born in the mud. It did not come from a display window.
The film often strikes the pose of savagery. It borrows the signs — untamed hair, rumpled costume, embrace as threat — but avoids the texture. What Brontë made emerge through structure and nested narratives, the direction replaces differently. Indeed, it uses immediate flashes and shots that seek the icon. You leave with the strange sensation of having seen many images and little time. It’s as if the tragedy had been compressed to fit a stream.
In the novel, the landscape is not a backdrop. It is a character, an atmospheric pressure, an exposed nerve. In the film, it looks like a painted canvas that trusted filters too much. Calibrated mist and watercolor digital skies create a particular atmosphere. Moreover, the interiors gleam like department-store windows. Everything displays itself, everything saturates and demands to be seen.
This accumulation is not innocent. It reflects an era that confuses intensity with volume. When Brontë constructs a world of social fractures, hereditary resentments and intimate violence, Fennell seems to prefer pose to depth. Passion becomes a series of tableaux and an album of evocative images. Thus, you smell peat less. But you perceive the scent of the lights more.
The scandal is not just about taste. It touches a deeper question: adaptation as an act of reading. Tackling Wuthering Heights is like entering a creaking house where every door opens onto another door, where stories nest like curses. The film chooses to wall up those corridors. It keeps only the first surge, the initial blaze between Catherine and Heathcliff (Cathy and Heathcliff), then stops, as if the story were only a prelude to promotion.
Emerald Fennell: From Insolence To The Industry Of Chic
We knew Emerald Fennell as biting, unpredictable, capable of installing a lasting discomfort in an over-polite parlor. With Promising Young Woman, she emerged as an edgy screenwriter, wielding irony like a blade and indignation as a dramatic engine. With Saltburn, she pushed further, into stylized indecency, assumed grotesque, provocation as signature.
Wuthering Heights feels like a third movement, less free, more industrial. The director retains her taste for excess, but excess has a new owner. It is no longer the author’s weapon against conventions. It becomes the fuel of an event-making machine. It’s not the filmmaker who imposes her vision, but the system that gives her a jewelry box and a massive budget. Moreover, it offers a global campaign and expects in return a recognizable product.
Within that logic, the reading of the novel adjusts. The film cuts, simplifies, erases. It removes structural characters, shrinks social stakes, attenuates the dimension of haunting and metaphysical fury. The house is no longer a place one returns to as one returns to a wound. It becomes a set where one photographs oneself in costume.
The bet is known, and sometimes fruitful. One can betray a classic and bring it to life, provided the betrayal is inhabited. Here, the betrayal resembles a strategy. You don’t get the feeling the film reads Brontë. You feel it uses her, like a prestigious title slapped on a soda bottle.
What’s missing, ultimately, is the shadowy part that makes Fennell’s strength when she permits discomfort. Here, the staging seems to ask permission from its own props. The gothic becomes a style rather than a disturbance, a color rather than a threat. The storm doesn’t break; it’s announced, displayed, then carefully wiped away.
Margot Robbie: Star-Producer In The Room Of Mirrors
Margot Robbie is no longer just an actress. She is a brand, a power, a decision-maker. Her position as producer adds a layer of reading to Wuthering Heights. Because the film, despite its gothic ambition, often seems constructed as a stage for its two headliners. Everything converges on them, everything lights them, everything frames them.
This is not a moral reproach. It’s a manufacturing observation. Hollywood in recent years has learned to transform the star into a total center of gravity. She doesn’t just play a character, she is the character, she is the event, she is the selling point. In this adaptation, Catherine sometimes seems less a Brontë heroine, devoured by her contradictions, than a silhouette designed to survive visually, to circulate, to become a clip.
The mismatch is all the more noticeable because Brontë writes a brutal youth, not a presentable youth. Catherine is a force that self-destructs. She is a storm that refuses compromise and ends up punishing herself. When the performance tilts toward chic, the storm becomes an accessory.
In the background, Margot Robbie’s recent career looms as a shadow. After embodying a global pop myth, she now steps into a dark romance. It’s as if cinema seeks to convert celebrity energy into novelistic gravity. The star crosses the film, but the film struggles to cross Brontë.
You can see the temptation: make Catherine a figure of today, a heroine expressed in gestures, silhouettes, flashes. But Brontë does not write a posture. She writes contradiction. And that’s where the star, paradoxically, becomes trapped. Not for lack of acting, but because the film prefers emblem to ambivalence.
Jacob Elordi As Heathcliff: Sex Symbol In A Role Too Tight
Jacob Elordi has the look of an era in which desire is told through calibrated shots and photogenic silences. He plays Heathcliff, one of the most difficult characters in English literature, a being shaped by humiliation, exclusion, rage and obsession. Heathcliff is not just a dark lover. He is an enigma, a violence, a presence that contaminates the narrative.
But by focusing on a succession of passionate scenes, the film reduces his mystery. It flattens him, makes him readable, therefore consumable. French critics noted an interpretation judged mechanical. Beyond the actor, it’s the function the film assigns him that raises questions. Elordi seems instrumentalized as a figure of desire rather than worked as a tragic figure.
Added to this reduction is controversy over Heathcliff’s casting. In the novel, Heathcliff is described with marked otherness, using 19th-century terms and categories that feed the racism and social contempt he faces. Every adaptation therefore confronts a contemporary question: how to represent this otherness without caricature or erasure. By choosing a white actor, the film shifts the debate. Some see erasure; others recall that Brontë herself cultivates ambiguity and adaptations have often varied. The film, however, doesn’t seem to want to inhabit that tension. It sidesteps it, as it sidesteps so many of the novel’s rough edges.
The cruellest thing for Heathcliff may be that. His otherness in Brontë is not a decorative detail. Indeed, it’s the engine of a humiliation that manufactures a monster. If you remove that fracture, you are left with a dark hero, ready-to-wear romanticism. And you then understand why the story, instead of biting, often settles for stroking the fur.
Marketing As Script, Criticism As Battlefield
The French launch of Wuthering Heights resembled a demonstration of discipline. Few images were offered beforehand, and access was controlled. Speech was framed, yet a massive presence imposed itself. Indeed, premieres, networks, official images colonize screens. The film, they say, looks like the extension of its campaign. It’s as if the narrative were only a pretext for the event.
This deployment rests on a large budget announced around $80 million. Moreover, it includes two faces capable of turning an adaptation into a global appointment. The calculation is simple: turn a rough work into an emotional destination where you buy an atmosphere as much as a story.
This impression fuels the violence of reception. In France, several critics spoke of a wreck, a film that hurts the novel and tires the eye. The attack targets both the overloaded form and the judged-impoverished substance. Conversely, a minority defense emerged denouncing severity tinged with condescension. Sometimes sexist reflexes are pointed out, sometimes a generational rejection is observed. That rejection targets an assumed register, that of contemporary dark romance.
This debate is revealing. It’s not only about whether the film is good or bad. It’s about what one expects from an adaptation and what one accepts Hollywood doing to a canonical text. When a novel becomes a global product, it attracts different audiences, opposing expectations. Some seek literary vertigo; others an immediate emotional experience. The film chooses the most direct path and exposes itself to the anger of some viewers. Those viewers hoped for shadow, silence and patient cruelty.
Brontë, The Erased Haunting And The Misunderstanding Of Dark Romance
Classifying Wuthering Heights as romance is not absurd, but it is insufficient. The book tells of a passion, yes, but a passion fed by injustice, money, education, humiliation. It is crossed by social cruelty and the question of property. It also addresses how a house can become a machine that reproduces wounds. Brontë does not compose a love story; she writes a contagion.
The film claims a dark romance reading, a contemporary register where fascination flirts with danger. It explores a realm where desire is experienced as a trial. On paper, the label could fit. In practice, it serves as a shortcut. It provides an emotionally readable manual, and it simplifies the novel’s complexity. Thus, it integrates it into an aesthetic and a campaign.
By keeping only the first half, the adaptation robs itself of what Brontë unfolds later: the spread of evil, the transmission, the terrifying idea that some people’s passion becomes others’ fate. Revenge, instead of settling as an architecture, remains an impulse. Haunting, above all, evaporates. In the novel, Catherine’s ghost’s appearance at the beginning is not an effect. It’s a declaration. What is played here will not close.
There’s nearly comic misunderstanding. Dark romance promises vertigo. The film often offers the vertigo of a set, not the vertigo of a fate. Black is a filter. Violence, a posture. The mist — that sensation the novel leaves in the reader like a bite in the throat — disappears. Indeed, it dissolves at the first spotlight.
A Classic On Screen, From Shadow To Mirror
If you measure the difficulty of Wuthering Heights on screen, it’s because the book has always resisted versions too sure of themselves. Cinema returns to it as one returns to an enigma. There have been adaptations that chose nobility, others earthiness, others simplicity. Some, by smoothing the labyrinthine structure, made beautiful melodramas. Others tried to render Heathcliff’s otherness, class brutality, the almost animal nature of that stolen childhood.
Public memory sometimes keeps an older version, where romanticism is confused with prestige. It also keeps rougher attempts, which remind that love in Brontë reconciles nothing; it fractures. Against that history, Wuthering Heights seems less a new reading than a conversion of the novel into a contemporary mirror — a mirror that does not reflect the moor, but the desire to make it a shareable image.
This shift may explain the anger. Viewers do not come just to check fidelity. They come to find a sensation of discomfort, that feeling you get when entering a lived-in house. Indeed, everything is inhabited, even silence. When the film offers a smoother, more decorative experience, the gap becomes an offense.
Charli XCX’s Music, Lifeline Or Escape
One element reaches consensus, even among the harshest detractors: the original score by Charli XCX. The choice is clever. It grounds the film in pop modernity. It creates a bridge between the 19th century and the streaming era. Moreover, it extends the experience beyond theaters.
But this musical success also says something troubling. You can like the music without the film. That means the film failed to integrate into its narrative. Charli XCX’s soundtrack, one of the few points of agreement, becomes an escape route, a way to keep the best and leave the rest.
In a world where films are spun into playlists, looks, clips, campaigns, music is no longer just commentary, it is a parallel product. Charli XCX, delivering an album in its own right, plays the century’s game: the fragmented work, consumable in pieces. And you wonder, for a moment, whether Wuthering Heights was conceived for that — to survive outside itself.
A Globalized Classic, A Tamed Tragedy
At bottom, Wuthering Heights’s shipwreck is not only that of a film. It tells of a broader metamorphosis: what happens to classics when they enter the global machine. You simplify them for export. You stylize them for recognition. You cast them to sell. You remove what sticks, what shames, what remains unexplained, in favor of an intensity easier to package.
Brontë’s novel resists ease. It does not flatter; it bites. It does not offer heroes; it offers beings who destroy themselves. It does not promise a love story; it shows an obsession that infects an entire world. From that perspective, Fennell’s adaptation looks like a display placed in front of a haunted house. It shines and attracts, drawing people in. Then it leaves visitors at the threshold, where the book used to yank you by the collar.
And yet, in this failure something is revealed. Hollywood is not interested in Brontë out of love for heritage. In reality, Brontë is an ideal brand for posters. The classic becomes a quality label and a literary varnish. Thus it gives romanced consumption the illusion of culture. A title, a couple, a slogan suffice, and the rest can be shaved down.
This film may still have a virtue. By contrast, it reminds that great works cannot be reduced to their summary. They demand time, silence, a form of courage. And if Wuthering Heights fails to make the moor habitable, it may at least make you want to return there differently — through the pages, through memory, by that sentence the cinema too often forgets, the simplest and harshest: intensity cannot be bought.